


kicked out of the garden of eden

by Iolaire02



Series: rags to riches [3]
Category: Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types, Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: A bit of an open ending, Character Study, Gen, Introspection, POV Third Person, The Problem of Susan, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-17 06:33:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29962344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Iolaire02/pseuds/Iolaire02
Summary: She thinks about the mission Aslan has given her, and shedoesfind him, but this is the thing about gentle hearts: they are easily broken.
Series: rags to riches [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2203581
Kudos: 2





	kicked out of the garden of eden

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Lady Like by Ingrid Andress, which I kind of think is (mostly) a great song for Susan.
> 
> Please enjoy, and feel free to let me know what you think!

Once upon a time there was a girl.

Once upon a time there was a girl who grew up a queen and who was forced out of her kingdom.

Once upon a time –

But this is not a fairytale.

* * *

Susan Pevensie is one of the few who gets to grow up twice. If anyone but her siblings knew anything at all about it, they would say that it is a gift, that she is lucky because of her second chance. They would say that now she has the opportunity to do the things she hadn’t done the first time around; they would say that now she has the chance to do it _right._

But it is hard to grow up right the second time around when she has already grown up.

Susan knows that a person can only ever grow up _once,_ and that after that any growing up again that they might do is really growing down. Specifically, after growing up a queen, Susan can only ever grow up a commoner, and there is no world – Narnia or otherwise – where that is anything but a step in the wrong direction.

For fifteen years of her life Susan will be of an age for the second time; for fifteen years of her life she will be trapped in a nightmare that she thought was a dream the first time around.

Because it _was_ a dream.

Do not make the mistake of thinking that dreams subvert reality. Dreams are just as real as anything else; _Narnia_ is just as real as anything else, but after being forced out of her home twice it hurts less to relegate her past as a queen to a game in her mind.

It is hard to mute the pain when everyone around her insists on picking at the open wound of everything Susan has lost, and so she gets rid of the problem at its root.

She tells Lu and Ed and Peter that Narnia was just a silly game, and their faces tell her that she has become too good a liar in the years since she became a queen dethroned. Don’t they know that, sometimes, people say things they don’t mean?

* * *

(Susan never knows it, but in a life after death Peter says that she is no longer a friend of Narnia. It is lucky she never hears his words – they would have broken her heart.)

* * *

Despite the pain that accompanies the loss of Narnia, Susan comes to realize two things. First: that Narnia was her first life. Second: that this is her rebirth.

It is a downgrade, to be sure, but she does her best with the lot she is given. She grows up again and she learns her world as best she can. She thinks about the mission Aslan has given her, and she _does_ find him, but this is the thing about gentle hearts: they are easily broken.

She gives herself time to heal – she waits until her bleeding heart has begun to scar over, and in the meantime she relearns herself.

In Narnia, Susan was beautiful. She was a queen.

In the place that was once home and that will be home again she is a child who has grown out of herself; she learns to make herself big enough that she fits inside her not-quite-right skin.

Susan learns over the years that Narnia’s beauty was part of what made _her_ beautiful. She remembers less than she forgets, but what she does remember is this: Narnia’s beauty came from the faith of its people and the faith of its people came from its beauty.

Susan shuts the memories of Narnia away – she does not forget it entirely, but she does not linger on the pain of it any longer. She focuses on the beauty she knows the country bears and she tries to find it in her own world.

* * *

(Susan cannot find her faith until she finds the beauty in herself – and she cannot do that until she discovers the beauty in the world.)

* * *

Susan goes to America and she finds beauty there. She returns home to England and it gets easier. She learns to see beauty in people, in things, and – eventually – in herself.

She has come to accept that she is beautiful in England in a different way than she was in Narnia.

Like Narnia, Queen Susan grew more beautiful with age. She saw it with her own eyes: she stumbled into a white wood blanketed with snow, and it was majestic indeed. But she returned over the years; she saw the snow and ice melt; she saw flowers spring up from the earth; she saw the trees and the nymphs dancing in the fog of midsummer nights while fauns played their flutes. Every time Susan saw that wood she thought it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.

Susan has seen a great many beautiful things.

Like England, Susan is only as beautiful as the things she finds. At first, when she is fresh out of Narnia’s embrace, she can find nothing. But over the years she learns – she finds beauty in the towering edifices that line the streets, in the faces of the men and women who stare down at her from billboards, in the cloudy gray skies that shield the world from the sun’s brilliant gaze.

She finds beauty in the inhuman stars that dapple the midnight sky, and on the nights when she dares to remember she finds that it doesn’t hurt, anymore, to think that these stars will never dance with her in their human forms.

Susan learns to find the beauty of Aslan and Narnia in her own world – she learns to find beauty in the tears that follow tragedy, in the people who gather around her. It takes years before she manages it through the grief and the pain that comes with losing a world, a kingdom, a _family…_

But she wakes up one day and she sees the beauty in herself just as completely as she sees it in the world.

* * *

(“My sister Susan is no longer a friend of Narnia,” Peter says in a life after death. But that does not mean that she will never find her way back.)

* * *

She wakes up one day and thinks of the invitation she received weeks ago when she was walking down the street. She looks at the flyer that was pressed into her hand, and she remembers for the first time in ages the mission Aslan had given her.

She thinks she has managed at least part of it.

Susan gets out of bed; she squirms into a pair of nylons; she slips on a dress and steps into a pair of pumps; she brushes her teeth and twists her hair into one of the few Narnian styles that is simple enough for her to do on her own, remembering how Lucy used to run her slender fingers through Susan’s dark hair, back home. She pulls a plastic tube and a pencil out of her vanity, and she traces careful lines before filling them in with bright red. She grins at herself in the mirror and tries not to wish that Ed and Peter were coming with her.

Her key is on the counter next to the invitation, and she swipes them both up as she passes. She steps outside and locks the door behind her. The trees are still; there are no talking animals; her family is dead. But –

It is Sunday, and Susan is as beautiful as the day with her nylons, her lipstick, and her invitation.


End file.
